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We’re having a sprint this weekend (Friday evening and Saturday) to help get our new developers and helpers of all sorts up to date. If you want to jump in on the project this weekend will be a supremely good time to do so (though there isn’t a bad time). Those who aren’t able to show up in person can participate over Mumble and we will be streaming over ustream during the sprint as well. We are looking at easy, free, and low bandwidth screen-sharing options other than google+ hangout since that can be bandwidth intensive with a lot of people using it and we likely don’t have the best pipes for that.

This month we will be closing out as many issues on github as we can and writing up documentation. If you can write/edit or use a liveusb come by and we’ll put you to work testing fixes and or witing editing docs 🙂

As usual we start at 8pm on Friday at HacDC and we return the next day at noonish to commence the hardcore geekery.

Pizza Friday night. Get there before 8pm if you want to have a say in toppings 😛

Project Byzantium is having a bug hunt today at noonish til’ later (9pm?). We are going to be running our livedistro an anything that will let us boot it, so bring your laptop or other x86 based system and we’ll see if we can find some bugs in our livedistro.
Snacks and coffee/tea/soda/juice are also good things to bring 🙂

UPDATE: We forgot to put the bit that makes it Byzantium in the build directory before we uploaded it Project Byzantium, a working group of HacDC, is proud to announce the release of v0.1 alpha of Byzantium Linux, a live distribution of Linux designed to fulfill a crucial role in the evolution of the Internet. That role is a rapidly deployable ad-hoc wireless mesh network which can augment or replace the current telecommunications infrastructure in the event that it is knocked offline (for example, due to a natural disaster) or rendered untrustworthy (widespread surveillance or disconnection by hostile entities). Unlike other mesh networking projects Byzantium was designed to be run on any x86 computer with at least one 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless interface. Byzantium can be burned to a CD- or DVD-ROM (the .iso image is just over 300 megabytes in size), booted from an external hard drive, or can even be installed in parallel with an existing operating system without risk to the user’s data and software. Byzantium Linux will then act as a node within the mesh and will automatically connect to other mesh nodes and act as an access point for WiFi-enabled mobile devices.

THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE! Do NOT expect Byzantium to be perfect. Some features are not ready yet, others need work. Things are going to break in weird ways and we need to know what those ways are so we can fix them. Please, for the love of LOLcats, do not deploy Byzantium in situations where lives are at stake.

FEATURES:

Binary compatible with Slackware v13.37, so existing packages can be converted with a single command.

Able to act as a gateway to the Internet if a link is available.

Linux kernel v2.6.38.8

Drivers for dozens of wireless chipsets

KDE v3.5

LXDE (2010 release of all components)

Mplayer

GCC v4.5.2

Perl v5.12.3

Python v2.6.6

Firefox v4.0.1

X.org v7.4 (? – hard to tell because each module has its own release code)

Custom web-based control panel

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (to use)

Minimum of 512MB of RAM

i586 CPU or better

CD- or DVD-ROM drive

BIOS must boot removable media

At least one (1) 802.11 a/b/g/n interface

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (for persistent changes)

The above requirements to use Byzantium

2+GB of free space on thumbdrive or harddrive

WHAT WE NEED:

Developers.

Developers!

DEVELOPERS!

No more Bill Ballmer impersonations.

People downloading and running Byzantium to find bugs and tell us where the problems are so we can fix them.

People filing bug reports on our Github page. We can’t fix what we don’t know about!

People who can help us translate the user interface. We especially need people fluent in dialects of Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu.

People to help us write and translate documentation.

Homepage (website coming soon)Download sites
Edit: Removed CC notice. The Byzantium Project is free and open source and to relieve any confusion the CC copyright notice for this document has been removed.

Approach on the 16th St side of the building. Look for the red doors. We are on the third floor. Follow the signs to our space after signing in with the guard. Before visiting unannounced, call to see if anyone is at the space.Phone: 202-556-4225 (HACK)